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Harold Garfinkel, a Common-Sense Sociologist, Dies at 93

Harold Garfinkel, an innovative sociologist who turned the study of common sense into a dense and arcane discipline, creating one of his field’s most challenging and fruitful branches of inquiry, died April 21 at his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif. He was 93.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his wife, Arlene.

Mr. Garfinkel was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was affiliated with the sociology department for more than half a century. By the time he became the faculty member in 1954, however, he was already concentrating on work that was in conflict with prevailing sociological theory, which focused on how societal rules and norms influenced behavior and created and shaped a social order. Mr. Garfinkel’s work sought to illustrate how members of society collaborate in creating and shaping a social order.

At U.C.L.A., he developed theories that coalesced into a sociological subdiscipline known as ethnomethodology, which is concerned with the pool of shared knowledge and shared reasoning procedures that members of a society use to respond to the circumstances in which they find themselves.

The idea had come to him, he explained, as he was working on a study of jury deliberations. He discovered that though jurors paid dutiful attention to judges’ instructions and the ways of thinking that the law prescribed, they made greater use of a different kind of logic: an assumed logic, which they expressed in phrases like “anyone could see” that such-and-such had happened. Mr. Garfinkel concluded that “a person is 95 percent juror before he comes near the court,” and his life’s work became focused on the common elements of knowledge and reasoning that citizens bring with them into the jury room — and everywhere else.

Mr. Garfinkel was sometimes likened to a quantum physicist because, in effect, he suggested that the fundamental building blocks of a social order were much smaller and much harder to observe than had been previously believed. Rules were not the smallest particles of social order, he found; rather, the rules themselves would be impossible without the bits of knowledge, the gestures and the methods of reasoning that allow people to communicate.

“At the time, most sociologists believed that if you could specify the rules people lived by, you could predict their behavior,” said John Heritage, a professor of sociology at U.C.L.A. and the author of the 1984 book-length study “Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology.” “He dropped a bomb on that idea, by saying rules need to be specified and interpreted in light of real world situations.

Photo

Harold Garfinkel.Credit
Jason Jimerson

“His point of view wasn’t that rules aren’t important, but that how they get interpreted and applied is a matter of mutual negotiation. We have to have common resources for any form of coordinated action of human beings, and we use these common resources just to exist in a shared world. It’s a fundamental part of the human condition.”

Mr. Garfinkel’s seminal work, published in 1967 under the title “Studies in Ethnomethodology,” was a series of essays that examined a number of seemingly disparate situations to expose the common-sense assumptions that are needed to make social life work.

He wrote, for example, about the plight of a transgendered individual living in a world in which most people presume that someone’s gender identity is a simple matter of male or female. In another instance, he wrote about an experiment in which school counselors gave random answers to students’ questions, observing that the students resisted the notion that their questions were not being answered responsibly; instead, he found, they manipulated their own logic to allow them to digest the responses as intelligible.

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He wrote about so-called “breaching” experiments in which the subjects’ expectations of social behavior were violated; for example, a subject playing tic tac toe was confronted with an opponent who made his marks on the lines dividing the spaces on the game board instead of in the spaces themselves. Their reactions — outrage, anger, puzzlement, etc. — helped demonstrate the existence of underlying presumptions that constitute social life.

“The book had an influence far beyond the particulars of what he wrote about,” Mr. Heritage said. “Not only did it deal with rules and language, which are fundamental elements of sociological study, but it reached across many fields: cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy. You wouldn’t get any argument if you said it was among the 10 most important books in sociology in the 20th century.”

Mr. Garfinkel was born on Oct. 29, 1917, in Newark, where his father, Abraham, ran a small business selling housewares. He studied business and accounting at the University of Newark (now Rutgers University, Newark). He received a master’s degree in sociology from the University of North Carolina and served in the Army, as a noncombatant, during World War II. Afterward he earned a Ph.D. at Harvard, where he studied with the noted sociologist Talcott Parsons. Early in his career he taught at Princeton and Ohio State.

In addition to his wife, the former Arlene Steinbach, whom he married in 1945, Mr. Garfinkel’s survivors include a daughter, Leah Hertz, of Glen Echo, Md.; a son, Mark Garfinkel, of Goleta, Calif.; and three grandsons. While he was at the University of North Carolina, Mr. Garfinkel wrote a short story, “Color Trouble,” which was published in Opportunity magazine and subsequently anthologized in “The Best Short Stories, 1941.” The story, about the persecution of a young black woman on a Virginia bus, was notable for its clarity of language, something Mr. Garfinkel’s sociological work was not known for.

As Professor Heritage wrote in the opening sentence of his book, “Notwithstanding his world renown, Harold Garfinkel is a sociologist whose work is more known about than known.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 9, 2011, on Page D8 of the New York edition with the headline: Harold Garfinkel, a Common-Sense Sociologist, Dies at 93. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe